Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Porn Again

Busted Halo carries a neat piece on an outreach to strippers ... Stripper Salvation|bustedhalo.com
JC’s Girls subsequently started an outreach to women in the porn industry, which was bit more difficult as adult movies are produced in studios on closed sets. To reach these women, JC’s Girls went to L.A. Erotica, a Los Angeles-based trade show for the adult industry.

Veitch looks back at that surreal moment, “A line forms to take our pictures and guys are surrounding us. We’ve got porn directors coming up to introduce themselves. They’d ask, ‘What movies are you in, where’s your web site?’ And I’d say, ‘Actually I’m here to talk to you about God.’ It was amazing and everybody was really nice about it.”
Totally awesome! Reminds me of these courageous folks.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

courageous? well, yes and no. i have never found protests to be that courageous.

but, oh man, it is unquestionably cringeworthy. i don't understand how anyone can tolerate such sickly sweetness. i'm guessing these guys are nondenoms trying to tap into youthiness, which really means they're trying to sell their own quickly fading youth.

they are trying too hard to seem chill. take the self-consciously slick design. it's hacked straight off the faux graffiti "posterized" look corporate coolsters are wearing on, e.g., nikefootball.com or swishnyc.com -- in itself ripped off warhol years ago. the site is a blatant attempt to appear cool, using an art medium that anyone my age can tell has been commodified: a copy of a copy of a copy.

ugh. apple-computer white backgrounds behind their mano-e-mano video talks (appropriate use of down to earthisms... "lemmie tell ya.") design this well-planned is guilty by association with the PR departments they're copping. when will we get it? the church is not cool, it is not going to be encooled, no matter how many catchy domain names we register. and we're not going to win on the grounds of cool by me-tooing what was in vogue last year. the church can't compete with cool and it shouldn't. cool is the enemy. the people are only ripe for evangelization when they tire of cool, when they can't get their fix from it anymore and they want something genuine. that was what cool said they'd get in the first place. we'll only beat cool when we stop caring about it.

verdict: smarm and unction. less than courageous because it is managed and designed. these guys look like gen xers, whose idea of sincerity is admitting you've blatantly sold out. they'll succeed in preaching to their choir, which has built up a massive resistance to this sort of creamy, sugary sludge, but they'll drive away every soul sick and tired of having their emotions manipulated by advertisers. that's exactly what, for instance, their "starvin' jesus" campaign feels like. it feels like an ad campaign. the church will lose honest people if tries to (so clumsily) manage perceptions.

i'm talking to you, "busted" halo.

Fr. Gaurav Shroff said...

Who is your clever indignant rant directed at? XXX Church? (That's whom I used "courageous" about. From what I've seen, they do some pretty amazing stuff.) Or Busted Halo itself?

If so, why don't you send it in to them?

One size doesn't fit all, my complaini' friend :-)

Fr. Gaurav Shroff said...

and ... who was protesting? The article was about an outreach to strippers ... I don't recall anything about protests?